Dan Bejar Interview

Recent­ly Dan Bejar was inter­viewed by CBC Radio 3 about (what feels like last year’s) Destroyer’s Rubies. These are real­ly some of the most inter­est­ing insights into his rela­tion­ship with his music that I’ve heard; plus, you get to hear the first 20 sec­onds of “3000 Flow­ers” like five times.

Thanks again to the Streethawk Live­Jour­nal com­mu­ni­ty for get­ting this to me. Click through to the full entry for a painstak­ing tran­script.

Bejar: I like to start off with, like, some fan­fare usu­al­ly. Maybe it’s because for me to use a line as a spring­board to write a song, I got­ta feel pret­ty strong about it in the first place, to think that some­thing else can fol­low it. That’s some­thing I’m still a suck­er for, is an open­ing line of a song that doesn’t sound like an open­ing line of a song usu­al­ly. It’s a pret­ty good trick, it works most of the time, or just annoys peo­ple.

CBC: Tell me a lit­tle bit behind your process of writ­ing lyrics. Where does this stuff come from and how do you get it down?

Bejar: I don’t know, some­thing just comes into my head, and I usu­al­ly will either try and remem­ber it or write it down, and I’m kind of attached to phras­es that have some kind of built-in melo­di­ous­ness to them, whether they’re rhyming or not. Then a long time will go by, and with a cou­ple excep­tions, I’ll pick up the gui­tar, which I nev­er usu­al­ly touch, and try and strap some chords on to these vague melodies that are attached to the words, and then even­tu­al­ly get the guts to play it for the band. Or, with a cou­ple exam­ples, just piece it all togeth­er in the stu­dio.

I think there’s some decent com­ic writ­ing in Destroyer’s Rubies. I mean I think there’s always been that ele­ment in a Destroy­er record. Not maybe fun­ny “ha ha,” but fun­ny that some­one would say that in the first place? I don’t know if that’s a good fun­ny, but, I think on this record there’s kind of just like lots of goofy asides, and it’s pret­ty laid-back. And I just want­ed, like, a lot of images. I know I was anti-images for a while and I thought, “That’s just like, hip­pie, Dylan, easy thing to fall back on.” But this seems to have just, like, more tak­ing joy in the act of writ­ing, and find­ing threads in strange, very visu­al acts. And usu­al­ly there’s a train, the words just kind of orga­nize them­selves for the most part, usu­al­ly by, like, chrono­log­i­cal batch­es of what was writ­ten when, or where.

CBC: Real­ly?

Bejar: A lot of times, yeah. Even though it’s not intend­ed that way, I’ll end up using a bunch of stuff that just occu­pies the same page togeth­er, even though I nev­er wrote it with that in mind. Which is real­ly great for me.

CBC: Two for the price of one?

Bejar: Yeah, there you go.

CBC: You can see that in the songs, I was gonna ask you about that. There’s a sense of con­ti­nu­ity between a lot of them. It feels almost like a thread run­ning through.

Bejar: Yeah, I mean some peo­ple think it’s just gib­ber­ish, or it’s just, like, cut-up, you know, like, that ‘70s Bowie-style of pulling sen­tences out of a hat. And, no, I mean it’s nev­er been like that. I think, even if I’m bad at, like, iter­at­ing what the thread is through­out one song, I think there’s always, like, some kind of inter­nal log­ic that works with the words, even if it’s just pho­net­ic, you know?

CBC: So what do you hope your lyrics do?

Bejar: What every­one hopes their lyrics do, which is just gar­ner some kind of emo­tion­al response, and reflect upon the music wise­ly, and you hope to come up with a voice that is rec­og­niz­able as your own, you know? I mean, I don’t know if that’s pos­si­ble, lots of peo­ple say it’s not, but, you just, like, wan­na have a mode of speak­ing, or singing, or what­ev­er, that seems true to how you imag­ine your­self, and keeps your­self, you know, enter­tained, for real, that, a song you can sing more than five times with­out get­ting sick of it, that’s always nice. I don’t know, I don’t know what oth­er peo­ple look for, I assume it must be some­thing sim­i­lar. I’ll ask ‘em.

I can say that if it was like a Destroy­er 101 class, it’d be like, some­thing epic, and fatal­ist, fol­lowed by an aside, which is “Trust me I had my rea­sons,” which is some­thing, you know, that you mum­ble to your friend who’s non-exis­tent. And then some­thing real­ly mate­r­i­al and maybe banal, and then anoth­er aside com­ment­ing on that which just came before it, the mate­r­i­al or banal thing, “Had a dress for every sea­son, it was worth it.” There, now any­one can write a lyric like that, and see how easy it is?

CBC: And do you just con­jure these scenes up in your head, like, are these things that you just imag­ine to be hap­pen­ing?

Bejar: I just have a ver­sion of what rich lan­guage is, and I want to enter­tain myself with it, and, just like, a bal­ance of, kind of, action, and image. I guess maybe I went through, like, a redis­cov­ery of poet­ry, I guess. I’ve nev­er real­ly read poet­ry before. I’ve dab­bled with it, but I’ve nev­er, like, gone through a real poet­ry phase.

I have a lot of stuff that doesn’t work, because it doesn’t work in music, because that’s always the first thing, is that, it has to work as a piece of music, and the two things are actu­al­ly real­ly dif­fer­ent, for obvi­ous rea­sons, you know? I mean, lots of things that look real­ly good, and when it’s time to try ‘em and sing ‘em, sound real­ly bad, or just wrong in that con­text. And maybe are bad and wrong, I’m not sure, I don’t know if singing some­thing is a test of how inher­ent­ly good it is, but there’s, like, a cer­tain musi­cal qual­i­ty to lan­guage that doesn’t always work out.

And things have to be sim­ple, you know? Like, you have to sim­pli­fy; that’s some­thing I’ve kind of dis­cov­ered in the last few years. I mean there’s still, like, a lot of words, but I guar­an­tee you that if you com­pare, like, Destroyer’s Rubies to City of Daugh­ters, say, the sheer amount of words has got­ta be, like, I mean there must be way less words on the new record, I hope. I mean I know some­times they get real­ly gar­bled and sped-up on the new record, but that’s ‘cause I’ve grown attached to this new, kind of barky, spo­ken-word deliv­ery. You know, that kind of Lou Reed style, which I’ve always loved but always thought would be a real­ly hokey thing to try and pull off, but now I’m just not scared of hokey things.

It’s real­ly the least intel­lec­tu­al­ized it’s ever been, you know? I’m just, like, jam­ming with the band, and singing this stuff, and there’s some threads that run in and out of it, but it’s still a lot of it has to do with, like, putting two things togeth­er and see­ing how they can pos­si­bly fit, or be even remote­ly close to being the same thing. “Oh ‘fire’ rhymes real­ly well with ‘har­bored an ele­men­tary desire,’ that’s so, it’s got­ta be in there! What else can rhyme with that? ‘Tire’? ‘Wire’?”

CBC: “ ‘Dire’?”

Bejar: “ ‘Dire’? Good, that’s good.” Yeah none of those real­ly worked at the time. It had to be fire, I’m pret­ty into fire these days.

But, aside from that, I think that there’s a lot more space in the songs. I don’t think they’re try­ing to impress with words any­more. I hope not, ‘cause that’s, I couldn’t care less about that.

CBC: Real­ly?

Bejar: Yeah. I mean that’s not a good rea­son for doing some­thing. You know, if you dis­cov­er that you’re real­ly good at this one thing when you first start writ­ing songs, and then you steer into your strengths as much as pos­si­ble, good things can come out of that, but I think it’s some­thing you have to, like, grow past. For God’s sake!